Today, more than ever, computer systems have been playing an increasingly important role in the lives of people and businesses. In a micro sense, decisions by machine processes can impact the way a system reacts and/or a human interacts with computer output.
People have come to expect that they can use computing systems to perform multiple tasks. They are relying on computing systems to support multiple applications, communications, and more generally, multiple goals of computer users. At the same time, users expect computers to respond to commands and application launches without significant latency.
There are limitations in the quantity of computational memory available at different levels of memory in a hierarchy of storage, and the memory at different levels has different latencies for access of program information and data. Differing amounts of required memory storage lead to different latencies in real time when an application or feature is accessed. In particular, this problem impacts users of portable devices (portable computers, cell phones, PDAs, . . . ), where typically, physical space for memory can be limited and sufficient memory capacity for system processing is usually much more expensive in terms of cost.
Interest has been growing in opportunities that attempt to solve, or at least reduce, latencies associated with application and data processing by including intelligent memory management for memory systems that employ statistical modeling methods which make predictions about system and user actions so as to provide guidance in decisions about managing the scarce memory resources. A goal with such intelligent memory management is to reduce latencies in the system by reducing the likelihood that the slowest memory, for example, a rotating disk media, will have to be accessed in real time to support a user command.
Machine learning and reasoning can facilitate the statistical characterization of next actions of the user and/or the system. Unfortunately, general machine learning and reasoning systems can require memory and storage that exceeds the memory and storage available in an operating system environment. Additionally, such systems may impose new latencies on operations, and thus, may result in increasing latencies, even if recommendations for memory management are overall good decisions.